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You either loved Don Sherwood or you hated him. But either way, you listened to him. He was born and raised in The City's Sunset District, christened Daniel Sherwood Cohelan but known to listeners within the sound of KSFO's signal as "Donny-babe." Heavy-smoking, hard-drinking and reckless living, Don Sherwood set the standard for every radio bad boy and shock jock to follow in his wake for decades to come. The product of a broken home his father's funeral was the only memory he had of his old man and a failure in school ("It took me five high schools to get through the eleventh grade," he recalled, "majoring in recess and tea dancing"), at sixteen Don lied about his age to join the Canadian Tank Corps as World War II accelerated. After it appeared that his regiment would be shipped off to combat in England, he quickly admitted his real age and headed back to San Francisco. Now a confirmed high school drop-out, Sherwood began attending classes at night while driving a lunch wagon during the day to make a buck. It was at night school that he would receive advice that would change his life forever: the prescient principal advised him to enter radio school, where his smooth, mellow voice would serve him well. He enrolled in Samuel Gompers School, later boasting that he graduated in only a few weeks so that he could go after his first job in broadcasting.
With his radio school diploma in hand, however, he was unable to find a station in the city willing to hire him. He enlisted in the Merchant Marine, serving until he was nineteen years old, then returned to San Francisco where KFRC offered him the break he was looking for: a temporary job as an announcer. The job was short-lived, but it inspired him to head to Los Angeles in search of radio work there. After a year of frustration and little employment in Southern California, he came home once again only to find the job market as bleak if not worse here. He accepted a six-month hitch as radio operator on an Army transport ship, and then found himself back in San Francisco once more, unemployed. Desperate for work in his chosen field, he made the rounds of the city's handful of radio stations, failing until KQW headquartered in the stately Palace Hotel; it would become KCBS a few years later offered him a foot in the door: a daily ten-minute program, from 5:50 to 6 a.m., during which he could play a few records, talk a bit and read the news. He would then hang around the station each day until 2 p.m. to announce the station identification and read the news headlines. It wasn't much, but it was a real job at a real radio station. Out Of The Mud Grows The Lotus To be continued...
RELATED EXHIBITS: SOURCES: Bay Area Radio Museum Collection; "Don Sherwood: The World's Greatest Disc Jockey," by Laurie Harper (Prima Publishing, 1989); Hap Harper; Ben Fong-Torres.
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